Menfolk

“Get Low” and “Life During Wartime.”

Bill Murray, Robert Duvall, and Sissy Spacek get ready for a funeral.Credit Illustration by Owen Smith

A reclusive soul, played by Robert Duvall, lives in a creaking house. What the locals know of him is sketchy, so they color it in with wild imaginings: he is a bogeyman, almost a beast, and not to be approached. That was the case with Boo Radley, whom Duvall played in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” his film début, in 1962, and it remains the case in his latest film, “Get Low.” The bright-blond thatch of hair is long gone, replaced by the tangled beard of a prophet. The smooth young face of Boo, with bruise-like circles around the eyes, now bears the ruts of time, but some things haven’t changed. Duvall (whose father was an admiral) is still the standard-bearer for containment—somebody the surrounding characters, like the viewing public, respect and even fear, yet by no means the owner of a cold heart. We lean toward him, seeking to learn more, only to find that his secrets will not be yielded up so easily. Hence the Duvall smile: not quite readable, and never far away, amused by our reliance on the world’s unsteady show, and by his own surprising place on center stage.

In “Get Low,” he plays Felix Bush, who lives alone in the woods, in Tennessee, cooking rabbits and chopping wood. Early on, we see him changing a sign on his property from “No Trespassing” to “No Damn Trespassing,” which is a cute way of telling us that here is a curmudgeon of the first order. When he ventures into the nearby town, someone throws a stone at him, and the speed with which the old man catches and beats the culprit suggests that age has not withered him but toughened him up. Felix is the type of fellow who gets up in the dark to stalk through the rain because he forgot to feed his mule. Falling asleep in the stable, he wakes in a pure blue morning, and talks to the dumb animal as if that were the only company he needed.

The task of “Get Low,” which was written by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell and directed by Aaron Schneider, is to draw the scowling Felix from his lair. He visits a funeral parlor, run by Frank Quinn. “I’m after a funeral,” Felix says. “Boy, are you in luck,” Quinn replies. We are in the nineteen-thirties, and times are no less hard in the funeral trade than in any other. “One thing about Chicago: people knew how to die,” Quinn says of happier days. When I tell you that Quinn is played by Bill Murray, you will gather—you will instantly hear, in your head—just how much spin, at once glum and energetic, these lines can bear. The great discovery that Murray has donated to cinema is that the drug of deadpan need not be a downer; bewilderingly, it can be an upper, even when you clearly have a heap of things to be down about, plus a face that looks like yesterday’s cinnamon Danish. It’s a treat to see that doughiness set off against Duvall’s severity. Add Sissy Spacek, effortlessly natural as a former flame of Felix’s, now widowed and flickering with regret, and we get a rich spread of dramatic styles. Those three actors have a combined age of almost two hundred. There must be youngbloods in Hollywood who can match them, but none spring to mind.

The funeral that Felix desires is his own. Moreover, he wishes to be alive and present at the obsequies. “I want everybody to come who’s got a story to tell about me,” he declares, and at this point I sensed the movie swivel away from what feels lean and locked-in about Felix and toward the folksy—just an inch or so, but too far. “A thousand years ago, he was the most interesting man I’d ever met,” the widow says, and Felix now starts to rekindle that interest, sprucing himself up, inviting the townsfolk to attend the service, and travelling across the state to unearth an elderly preacher who will speak at it. There will even be a lottery, whose winner will inherit Felix’s land.

In short, our hermit is resocialized. “A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty,” Emerson wrote, in an essay from 1857 called “Society and Solitude,” and Schneider’s film can be taken as an act of obeisance to that decree. The clothing is literal, and very plush it is, too; half the characters, who seem suspiciously plump with health for Depression-era country folk, are clad in a mixture of soft leather, herringbone tweeds, fur collars, and silk scarves, all of it beautifully photographed, by David Boyd, against a backdrop of smoke grays and autumnal browns. But what end does the beauty serve? Does it not, like the screenplay’s total elision of racial unease, hasten the gentling of a harsh tale? Think of the spare, almost desiccated grace with which Buñuel and his cameraman, Gabriel Figueroa, filmed “Simon of the Desert” (1965), another saga of a friendless spirit. Buñuel could afford to be dry, humoring the lofty ascetic motives of his hero, whereas a director like Schneider, though fixated on period detail, is utterly modern in his sensibility, his moral duty being to bring Felix back into the fold, as if loneliness were an insult to our common ideals.

The funeral is a lively affair, yet it signals the demise of the movie. There is a carnival air, with food being grilled and fiddle music played, but Felix, largely in closeup, takes the microphone and confesses to an ancient sin. He is wholly in earnest, of course, no more likely to fool us than if he were sitting on Oprah’s sofa. Had I been in that crowd, I would have been tempted to shout, Don’t tell us, old man! Keep your mystery, and your land, to yourself! Duvall could have done it; imagine him bending down to whisper his guilt into Spacek’s ear, with Murray close by, eavesdropping, and the rest of us shut out. Or imagine if Felix had died beforehand, leaving his baffled mourners to do the whispering. “Get Low” is deftly played, and it rarely mislays its ambling charm, but what a forbidding fable it could have been if the truth about Felix Bush, rather than emerging into sunlight, had slunk back into the woods.

For anyone who finds the films of Todd Solondz, like “Happiness” and “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” too acidic on the tongue, his new work, “Life During Wartime,” is to be recommended. Not that it’s an antidote; Solondz will never be meek and mild, and there are spasms of shame and awkwardness here that will make even devoted viewers wince as sharply as ever. But the movie, his best to date, and a sequel of sorts to “Happiness,” feels drenched in an unfamiliar sadness, as his characters feel the past surging in upon them and the hopes of the future receding before their gaze. “Down here it’s easy to forget everything,” Trish (Allison Janney) says, of her existence in Florida, but she’s kidding herself; nothing, in Solondz’s world, is harder than forgetting, except the will to forgive.

Trish has the best of intentions when she lies. Her former husband, Bill (Ciarán Hinds), was jailed for pedophilia, and she told her younger children that their father was dead, although their older brother, now at college in Oregon, knows the facts. At the start of the story, Bill is released. One look at him—those long, graven features and the prison-cropped hair above—and you see every millimetre of remorse, self-execration, and, worst of all, an undying compulsion to sin. It’s a dauntless performance by Hinds (and some compensation for his oddly curtailed role as a second-in-command to Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood”), and it peaks with a formidable scene in a hotel bar, both a pastiche and a deepening of nineteen-forties noir, where Bill is propositioned by a low-lidded vamp (Charlotte Rampling) whose regard for humanity is even baser than his. Later, after sex, she watches him steal her cash, and says, “I understand. It was hard work. I’m old.” Her words are a punch in the gut.

In a way, the scene interrupts the movie’s main business, which is, this being Solondz, the everyday hostilities of the family. (Thus the title.) Trish has two sisters, one of whom, the miserable Joy (Shirley Henderson), is plagued by a pair of men, or by the memory of them—they come and go like ghosts. Then, there is Helen (Ally Sheedy), who has decamped to California, and who is too much a target for snickering satire—Solondz’s least effective weapon—to make an impression. Trish herself is hoping to be married again, this time to the corpulent Harvey (Michael Lerner), whom she admires wholeheartedly for not being what she calls “sicko pervy.” Janney’s upbeat, quick-smiling lilt is quite heartbreaking, the ideal counterweight to Hinds’s sorrow. They never meet in the movie, I regret to say, yet what binds them together is the light; most of “Life During Wartime” is set in Florida (nicely played by Puerto Rico, it turns out), and Ed Lachman’s photography serves up a hot, unsettling brew of yellow and orange. We see it everywhere, from Trish’s halter-neck dress to the façades of hotels and the lamplight beside a bed, and it distills the entire film—sour and strong, touched with the warmth of the Sunshine State, and licked by the fires of Hell. ♦

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